


Relapse

by Nyssa



Category: Starsky & Hutch
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-17
Updated: 2010-10-17
Packaged: 2017-10-12 18:08:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyssa/pseuds/Nyssa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hutch backslides.  Not pretty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Relapse

Heroin is the world's most powerful painkiller. Users fall in love with it because of its matchless high. The sweet, velvet slide into bliss, the slow winking out of the world. The neat consolidation of all problems into just one -- how to get more of it.

But repeated use changes things. That spiraling rapture gets elusive. Being high becomes routine; being straight becomes unbearable. Junkies use because that's the only time they feel normal, the only time they don't feel pain.

You know that. You knew it in a removed, academic sense, even before Forest. You've dealt with addicts, busted pushers, read reams about it, from William Burroughs' _Junky_ to the section of the U.S. Code dealing with Schedule 1 controlled substances ("The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse"). It's part of your job, and it interests you, in the same way hookers interest you. It's fascinating, the allure of the forbidden, the dirty. You realize that's a cliche, but you're only human.

Fascinating, sure, but you never did anything about it. Not even after Forest, when you didn't have to wonder about it anymore, when you _knew_. Not even those nights when you wanted it so much you had to run for miles, lungs burning, heart shuddering, until the wanting retreated sullenly back where it belonged, buried as far down your brain stem as you could shove it. Starsky thought you'd killed it. He was proud. He never doubted you.

But Starsky's gone. You couldn't save him. You failed. And you needed him so badly, for so many reasons. This is just one of them.

So you head home with the bag in your pocket and your wallet ten bucks lighter. You don't expect to get high, exactly. You just want to get numb.


End file.
